CLEVELAND — When he’s loosening his right arm during the late stages of a close game, Emmanuel Clase hoists a heavy green ball over his head and slams it to the ground. The ball thwacks the ground with a thud that Guardians bullpen coach Brian Sweeney claims can “register on the Richter scale.”
“You can literally feel the ground shake,” said fellow reliever Sam Hentges.
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Clase threatens the cinder blocks that compose the wall in the area behind the home bullpen at Progressive Field. His bullpen mates regularly joke about the wall crumbling from the force of his heaves.
“Everybody else tries to replicate it,” Sweeney said, “but it’s just not quite there.”
Well, no one else throws 102 mph.
That requires some upper body strength, sure. But the key to Clase’s golden arm? It’s his flexibility.
He credits being a lanky, 140-pound teenager and having the mobility to stretch in all sorts of directions. His agility allows him to get deeper into his motion, to rare back and unleash a pitch at maximum effort when he delivers.
That’s how he crafted one of the speediest pitches in the major leagues, plus a slider that packs elite vertical and horizontal movement and travels to the plate at the same velocity as many of his teammates’ fastballs.
Sweeney first noticed Clase’s flexibility one day in 2021 in the visitors bullpen in Kansas City, when Clase sat down with his backside on the bench and both feet tucked behind him. Clase smiled at his coach, who couldn’t believe how seamlessly he assumed such a nimble position.
It’s not just his lower half, though that’s the primary source of his power. Clase can bend his fingers back far enough to just about touch the back of his hand. That arms him with a firm grip of the baseball, in a similar way to Pedro Martinez, who for years used his long, nimble fingers to his advantage to torment hitters with an elite changeup and curveball. Martinez, a fellow native of the Dominican Republic, was one of Clase’s idols, especially as he initially climbed through the Padres organization as a starting pitcher.
The way Clase grips the baseball results in his fastball breaking in toward lefty hitters and away from righties, which explains why it’s classified as a cutter, and why hitters struggle to make solid contact. He said he occasionally develops calluses on his middle finger from throwing the pitch.
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“One hundred miles per hour is one thing,” said Joe Torres, Cleveland’s assistant pitching coach, “but when it’s moving, it’s another thing. He’s a tough freaking pitcher.”
Torres first saw Clase in April 2019, when Clase was closing out games for the Rangers and Torres was coaching at Class-A Lynchburg. Clase was throwing 100 mph and commanding it, and he retired future teammates Nolan Jones and Oscar Gonzalez one evening.
But when Clase joined the Cleveland organization in the Corey Kluber trade eight months later, there were some hurdles, some questions about his maturity, effort and dedication to routines. The disconnect between Clase and the team only grew when the pandemic cut short spring training and then he was slapped with a season-long ban for a positive performance-enhancing drugs test. He and the team didn’t communicate much that summer, in part because Clase often lacked cell phone service in rural Rio San Juan.
However, when Clase arrived for camp in 2021, with some guidance from veteran reliever Oliver Pérez, he seemed different to those around him, ready to embrace responsibility and work ethic, and eager to pitch as often as possible and in the most pivotal situations.
“It’s been an incredible change of events for him,” said Sweeney, who dubbed Clase, 24, “a leader in the pen.”
Last summer, Clase cemented himself as the club’s closer, seizing control of the ninth inning when James Karinchak began to falter after the All-Star break. His walk rate decreased and his increased reliance on the slider paid dividends. This season, opposing hitters are batting .138 against his slider, with a whiff rate of 41.1 percent.
Catcher Luke Maile said no pitcher in the league has a remotely similar arsenal. Clase ranks at or near the top of every pitching leaderboard, from walk rate to opponent exit velocity. His league-best chase rate — his ability to convince hitters to offer at a pitch out of the strike zone — is 46.2 percent. League average is 28.4 percent.
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Triston McKenzie: “I think everybody in baseball is jealous of him.”
Hentges: “He was given a gift that not many people have ever been given.”
Ernie Clement: “I don’t think anyone in the league wants to face him at all. People just don’t really have a chance. It’s honestly a lot of luck involved.” (And that’s coming from another guy familiar with pitching in the ninth.)
Maile: “Guys who go up there, a lot of times they just cross their fingers and hope he’s going to throw the harder one and they cheat to it. And sometimes they get it. But when he has a slider on top of it, and he shows he’ll throw it two, three, four times in a row, it’s pretty special stuff.”
Clase craves the critical moments. When protecting a narrow lead against the Yankees earlier this month, a pair of runners reached on a walk and an error. Clase paced around the mound, shouting to rile himself up as he awaited his next duel. When New York dispatched Aaron Judge to pinch hit with two outs and the tying runs aboard, Clase was giddy.
“He lives to pitch,” Sweeney said. “No moment is too big for him.”
That includes the All-Star Game. From the day he learned he’d earned a spot on the American League roster, Clase said he wanted the ball in the ninth inning. He said he was eager to meet the game’s top players … and eager to strike them out.
American League manager Dusty Baker granted his wish. Clase entered in the ninth at Dodger Stadium, tasked with preserving the AL’s one-run advantage. He threw 10 pitches, all cutters, all ranging from 98 to 100 mph. Three pitches to Garrett Cooper, three strikes. Three pitches to Kyle Schwarber, three strikes. Clase misfired with his initial offering to Jake Cronenworth, which prevented him from recording an immaculate inning, but he proceeded to throw three consecutive strikes past him, too.
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“The guy was born to throw a baseball,” Sweeney said.
(Top photo: Mark J. Terrill / Associated Press)
